Removal tool for McAfee pre-installed and trial anti-virus software
If you’ve read any of my previous posts about creating a McAfee installer for our campus that would remove all pre-installed versions of other anti-virus software, you’ll know that the best thing Symantec’s ever done is create the Norton Removal Tool. This nifty piece of software is really the only program that gets into the nitty-gritty, seedy underbelly world of Norton and strips it clean out of your system, rendering it usable again.
While I’ve been using Symantec’s tool in my installer (which installs our site license of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i) for over a year now, there hasn’t been a defense against the rising tide of cheap, junkware McAfee products that are showing up on more and more of the Dell computers our students buy. Thankfully, one of my colleagues found a link on a Dell forum (NOT the McAfee site–hide the shame, hide it!!!) which revealed the existence of a similar removal tool for McAfee products. There are some helpful instructions on that link, or you can just download and run the tool directly from here.
As an interesting side note, I’ve had a machine actually running Enterprise 8.5i that’s thrown me nothing but trouble. I’ve ‘completely’ uninstalled McAfee and the ePO Agent 4.0, but I simply can’t make the problem go away (framework error, whee!). I’m going to try this new tool soon on that machine, to see if it actually solves the problem. I’ll post again when I have some results.
Comments
ashwani (Jul 23, 2008)
unable to remove mcafee 8.5i virus scan
enterprise
khodor (Apr 09, 2009)
thanks